Dear Editor:
Reducing the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is imperative if we are to avoid climate catastrophe.
What doesn’t make sense, is that our politicians want to subsidize the fossil fuel industry to research carbon capture and storage. We already know how to do this using biologically enhanced agricultural management (BEAM). Instead of wasting money on the fossil fuel industry, the government should be using it to help farmers transition from conventional agriculture to BEAM – it takes about three years to make the switch.
BEAM combines the principles of regenerative agriculture (low or no till, no pesticides or herbicides, and little or no fertilizer) along with an understanding of how mycorrhizal fungi and bacteria form a symbiotic relationship with plants to provide nutrients and water, and store carbon in the soil.
BEAM works in my small vegetable garden and in a 10,000-acre corn and soy farm in Iowa where, over a three-year period, the application of nitrogen was reduced from 200 units/acre to 50 units/acre with the same or better yield, the use of Roundup was reduced from 100% to 0% and the profit increased from $100/acre to $400/acre.
If 45% of the global arable land switched to BEAM, not only would we have healthier food and more profitable farming, we would also capture and store all the yearly global anthropogenic fossil fuel emissions in the soil each year for up to 75 years, before the soil would be saturated. Hopefully we can cut our yearly fossil fuel emissions to zero long before that.
Understanding the importance of fungi and bacteria in the soil is relatively recent, but much research has been done, there are many papers and books on the topic and successful examples abound. When will our politicians wake up?
Ron Moore,
Hillsburgh